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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Yemen.

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Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

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Photos from Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Yemen.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



Anna Quindlen and Andrew Solomon Join Discussion about Media and Transgender Children

My blog post last week - about Coy Mathis, the 6-year-old transgender Colorado child - drew some strong responses from readers. On Twitter, I immediately heard from those who sharply questioned my suggestion that “the willingness of the child” be considered, along with parental approval, in deciding to name her and use photographs of her. As many of these critics (some of whom were parents) noted, young children are willing to do many things they might regret later; they don’t have the maturity to know how their actions will play out.

More thoughtful reasoning than mine came from Anna Quindlen, the author and former Times columnist whose work I have long admired. She wrote in an e-mail:

I was intrigued by your journal entry today because it raises a question that is so beautifully and intelligently explored in the new book “Far From the Tree,” by Andrew Solomon. If you haven’t read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is about children who are essentially different than their parents â€" there is a chapter on transsexual children and their families-but an overarching question he raises is when and whether parents have a moral right to make certain choices for their minor children. Can hearing parents really make a dispassionate decision for a toddler about a cochlear implant What about the average-sized parents of a dwarf, who, if she is to receive painful and extensive limb-lengthening surgery, must begin at 7 or 8 And do parents make such decisions based on what is best for their child or what is best for their self-image

It’s a fascinating question, and I thought of it when you noted that Coy’s parents had agreed to let her be photographed and interviewed. They have the legal right to do that, I’m sure-but do they have the moral right to do so I don’t know the answer. I only know that, as Solomon suggests over and over again in his exceptional book, parents frequently make decisions based on a complex calculus that has as much to do with them as their kids. I know I did that even as I tried not to do so.

Ms. Quindlen’s e-mail prompted me to get in touch with Mr. Solomon, who had appeared on Katie Couric’s ABC program with Coy Mathis and her parents last month. In a phone interview, he agreed that young children can’t be allowed to make important decisions for themselves, joking that he won’t let his own four-year-old son decide what to have for dinner, much less make choices that could change his life forever. Parents’ accepting and loving guidance is a necessity, he said.

But, on balance, he sees “an enormous greater good” coming from children such as Coy Mathis and her parents taking their stories public and in articles like the one in The Times. He spoke of another transgender girl, 11-year-old Jazz, who became well-known through a January interview with Barbara Walters.

“The presence of these children has a huge impact” in making other transgender children feel that they are not alone and that their lives are not a cause for shame, Mr. Solomon said, noting the high rate of suicide and despair among transgender children.

Stories like these can “spare families enormous suffering.”

In addition to that greater good, there is potential for personal benefit to the child as well: being able to live openly and honestly, and in some cases, even to feel a sense of mission in helping other children accept themselves.

“There is a tendency to see this as shameful and best kept secret,” he said. “That is tremendously burdensome.”

I talked at length, after the post appeared, with the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, who described making decisions involving a child’s privacy as “a very difficult issue, made more difficult because of the Google factor.” By that, he means that references to the child in news stories “live on forever and are instantly accessible.”

“That doesn’t change our fundamental approach of weighing what we need to tell our readers against privacy concerns,” he said, “but it is a complicating factor.”

But, Mr. Corbett added, “Our default setting is to inform readers, not to withhold information.”

The Times article, sensitively told by Dan Frosch, “certainly had more impact because of the pictures, the details, the name,” Mr. Corbett said. Without those elements, he said, “We would have lost something.”

It is, of course, a tricky balance. “We need to be reluctant to say we know better than a child’s parents what’s good for the child,” Mr. Corbett said.

Reporters do need to be sensitive to parents whose motivations are questionable. “That doesn’t seem to be the case here,” he said.

Many readers also questioned the thinking that, because Coy Mathis had already appeared on a network talk show and elsewhere, The Times had a less difficult choice to make.

Mr. Corbett responded to this point: “When something is so widely known that there’s no privacy left to protect, that does weigh into our consideration,” he said. “We need to think it through every time and be prepared to pull back.”

In this case, he said: “We did a thoughtful, difficult story on an important subject. It’s a decision we’re comfortable with but not an easy one.”

Without a doubt, Mr. Solomon said, “It’s murky territory.” News organizations should evaluate the motives of parents who are willing to make their child’s story public and to actively advocate, as the Mathises have done.

“There’s a lot of self-aggrandizement that can creep in, but I don’t think that’s so in this case.”

The media “has to assess the balance of harm and good,” Mr. Solomon said. There are risks but “the positives count, too.”



Sunday Column: The Times’s Work in Progress

The Times’s Work in Progress

SINCE I started as The Times’s fifth public editor last September, I’ve taken up topics from “false balance” in news articles to negative arts criticism to government secrecy. After six months, 16 Sunday columns and close to 100 blog posts to the Public Editor’s Journal, I thought it would be worthwhile to see where some of the issues I have written about stand now.

QUOTE APPROVAL Early in my tenure, I called for The Times to prohibit the practice of allowing news sources to approve quotations for use in news articles. Times management was already considering such a move, and soon issued such a policy.

Last week, I asked the Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, how that policy was going, since Washington stories were some of those most affected by the change. “Some in government are less willing to talk to us, and we have lost a few interviews,” he said. “But the cost has been entirely bearable, and the policy is an improvement.”

Reporters still do a great deal of reporting on background and later negotiate with sources to put quotations on the record â€" a practice that the policy allows â€" but “we won’t allow people to edit what they’ve said, after they’ve spoken to us, which often was taking place through a spokesperson,” Mr. Leonhardt said.

I’m glad The Times has made this move; quote approval was an insidious practice that had to end.

THE HAZARDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA Twitter and Facebook can be dangerous places for journalists. I wrote about two cases in which problems arose: a sexist Twitter message from the Times magazine freelancer Andrew Goldman to the author Jennifer Weiner, and eyebrow-raising Facebook and Twitter messages by Jodi Rudoren as she began her new post as the Jerusalem bureau chief.

The Times dealt with the situations in quite different ways: by suspending Mr. Goldman from his column for a few weeks and by assigning an editor to work with Ms. Rudoren on her social media efforts. A deputy foreign editor, Michael Slackman, told me that Ms. Rudoren’s social media presence eventually fell off as she dug into her new beat and that she uses it now “primarily to cover the news and far less as a public journal.” When she does post on Facebook and Twitter now, the messages are no longer vetted by an editor, according to the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, but are “monitored,” as are those of other reporters.

Mr. Goldman told me in an e-mail that he had only gradually returned to Twitter: “I learned the hard way that I have a foot that fits remarkably well in my mouth. Now, I’m doing what I should have done all along: let the interviews speak for themselves.”

Last fall, The Times also reissued its social media guidelines and emphasized that they applied to freelancers as well as the newsroom staff. The guidelines are general ones that basically say, “Think first and remember that you represent The Times.”

THE TIMES’S BUSINESS MODEL Like all newspaper companies, The Times is dealing with tough challenges as print advertising â€" long its major source of revenue â€" continues its sharp decline. At the same time, it is reinventing itself as a global digital media company.

In recent months, a new chief executive came on board, 30 newsroom management positions were eliminated in a cost-cutting effort, and The Times announced plans for new ways of finding revenue. One development: The Times will run more events like the DealBook conference, which I questioned last fall because such events sometimes blur the line between journalism and marketing.

Another development is the transformation of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, which will become The International New York Times. And the company has reorganized both its business-side management ranks and its newsroom leadership.

In a recent speech at the University of Michigan, Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that excellent work would save the day: “Quality, serious journalism that is thoroughly reported, elegantly told and that truly honors the intelligence of its readers is the business model of The New York Times.”

But the challenges are as daunting as they are diverse â€" as The Times found out when its Chinese language Web site, an important part of its global strategy, was blocked by the Chinese government last fall; months later, it remains blocked. Safe arrival on the shore of stable profitability in the digital age won’t be achieved in 2013; it is a long journey, with headwinds all the way.

ACCURACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE One of the low points of the period was The Times’s error-ridden coverage of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. The Times briefly named the wrong person as the gunman online, and, even the next day in print, it made serious errors about how Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School, about his weapons, and about his mother’s role at the school. While other news organizations had the same problems â€" and many far worse â€" readers hold The Times to a higher standard. Since then, editors have met several times to discuss solutions.

“Newtown forced us to ask ourselves some questions and tighten up our practices,” Ian Fisher, the assistant managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s digital report, told me. Mr. Fisher said there would be more reluctance to attribute an important fact to other media organizations, as The Times did when it identified Ryan Lanza as the gunman instead of his brother.

In addition, he said, breaking stories may include “cautionary language” that clearly tells the reader that some facts aren’t yet known. In addition, a more streamlined editing process should reduce the internal confusion that resulted in what Mr. Fisher called “some self-inflicted wounds.” In short, he said, “We took it very seriously.”

-

My last print column suggested that the American public’s first knowledge of the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison came from a press leak. As an astute reader pointed out, the United States military, responding to an internal complaint, had announced its investigation before news organizations obtained leaked information that provided much of the detail that so outraged the world.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 24, 2013, on page SR14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Times’s Work in Progress.

Wading Into Weirdness on the Street

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It’s another typical day: there’s a commute, work, people in the street; it’s been done before, and it can be expected to happen again tomorrow. But for Stephen McLaren, these seemingly humdrum routines are packed with weirdness.

He’s the guy with a camera, a wry sensibility and a measure of both luck and patience; a San Francisco-based street photographer of Scottish extraction whose work feels like a field guide to how normal things can be really odd, contradictory â€" and visually rich.

“I’m a naturally inquisitive, kind of curious person,” he said. “So I’m really quite happy to hit the ground running, to just kind of see what transpires.”

The idea of a field guide is apt, since Mr. McLaren’s method can resemble that of a naturalist. He described staking out a scene, waiting for the subject to step into the tableau he has framed. Or he’ll stalk a subject â€" a man wrestling an oversize Christmas tree home, for instance (below).

“I know this scenario very well, and look for people who are trying to manhandle trees that are quite a bit bigger than them,” he said. “They always underestimate what a job it is. I’d been following this guy for several hundred yards.”

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren From the series “East End.”

He tends to invite himself into spaces, private properties â€" “pretty much anything with a door,” he said â€" pretending to be a tourist and “bumble in” uninvited to a function or restaurant. He takes his pictures and basically waits “until someone asks you what you’re doing there.”

Then he’s told he had better leave.

It helps that Mr. McClaren mentally catalogs moments, even if they pass by without his getting the shot. “Typically, I find if something happened and I’ve missed, I kind of log it, and think that there’s a good chance it’s going to happen again,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than beating yourself up about missed photographs. It’s a waste of energy.”

Mr. McLaren’s background is in television documentaries, which he made for a time in his native Scotland and then in London, before moving to the United States. Making a living as a still photographer is relatively new to him â€" he began shooting exclusively six years ago â€" but it has since taken him all over Los Angeles, New Orleans, inside the Ikea in Beijing and elsewhere.

He belongs to a collective of four Scottish photographers called Document Scotland, which does just that, at an important time for Scots as they prepare for next year’s referendum on Scottish independence. Unfortunately, Mr. McLaren, who lived in London before relocating to the United States West Coast, has disenfranchised himself, as only residents of Scotland in Scotland can vote. The collective expects to compile a book in time for the vote.

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren An Ayrshire shepherd in Scotland.

But Mr. McLaren seeks to do more than merely pluck strange moments out of time or create a loving record of his homeland. Some works, like his series “Moral Hazard” â€" which offers a street-level view of the global fiscal crisis as it unfolded in London and will be available in a forthcoming book â€" is an attempt to get closer and deeper to what he sees in front of him.

“Obviously, that’s impossible with photography, to get to that level,” he said. “But it’s worth striving for, using â€" hopefully â€" great visual intelligence to bring the metaphorical side of it to life. I hope that people understand that it’s not saying two plus two equals four â€" there are some open-ended issues that people can wrestle with if they wish.”

In London, amassing material for his series, Mr. McLaren’s pursuit of that metaphorical side took him to London Bridge. It is a common location for photographers â€" professionals and amateurs alike â€" and every day, people cross the bridge as they rush to their trains home. Mr. McLaren, facing the tide of thousands of commuters going in one direction, noticed a little podium in front of him. “They’re always looking for tiny little shortcuts that will get them to the platform of the train a nanosecond quicker,” he recalled.

Every now and then someone would climb the podium and leap off, hoping to get a tiny advantage over the others heading home (Slide 1).

“I stood there for an hour, waiting for someone who looked most resolute in getting this little sliver of time,” he said. “It brought a bit of levity to the idea of all these commuters rushing home. It’s not a dreary picture â€" a lot of pictures of London Bridge are of all these commuters looking dreary and sad and miserable, and I like to think this one has a little bit of joy behind it as well.”

DESCRIPTIONStephen McLaren “Goldilocks Economy,” from the series “Moral Hazard.”

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From Today’s Paper: Catholics Celebrate Palm Sunday in Israel

Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

In Jerusalem’s Old City, priests and others carried palm fronds early Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, believed by many to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ.



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